an insatiable appetite for my region by VINCENT NATTRESS

Archive for the ‘Orchards’ Category

The humble Italian Prune Plum has probably been on Whidbey Island for over a century. There is nothing better for baking and preserving and they are happening right now.

If I am going to eat a fresh plum, then a Santa Rosa Plum, with its super fragile, water-balloon-like flesh is my hands down favorite. But when it comes to making jam, jelly or a plum tart, they cannot hold a candle to the much less sexy but ever more versatile Italian Prune Plum. It just so happens that we have a bumper crop Italian Plums this year in Coupeville. Here is what you can do with them. (more…)

The Yellow Transparent variety of apple, which originated in Russia, was introduced to the United States around 1870. This is a common, old time variety here on Whidbey Island, and right now they are ripe and fallnig on the ground everywhere you look.

A friend of mine told me that when he was a kid in the 1940’s he knew the location of every fruit tree within a three mile radius of his house. For him summer was all about which yard had the best plum tree, with limbs that had grown over the fence, draping into the alley so that he could get at the fruit. Of course he admits that as a youth he was not at all averse to jumping a fence if he thought he could get at those plums and not get caught. I appreciate that story because I too grew up with fruit trees, both here on Whidbey Island as well as in Northern California. I can attest that a ripe apricot, picked right off the tree on a warm early summer day has the potential to change a child’s life forever. (more…)

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Welcome

This blog is an exploration of my region's food, season by season. I will focus on foraging, farming and how to cook what I find. I will also discuss food politics and the history of what we eat and why.

Foraging often reveals traditions that make this region unique. I will do my best to remind us of some of these vanishing traditions, because they reveal a lot about our cultural history.

Agriculture shapes the landscape we live in. Right now farming is undergoing a critical transition. More than ever we all need to understand the importance of diverse, regional food production, for what it means to our region, our bucolic surroundings, the safety and stability of our food system and our own personal health.

Exploring these food issues reveals a lot about our environmental and economic issues too. I will ask questions about the ways in which we are changing our food systems and how, as a result, our food is changing us.

This is a bountiful area, but also a changing area, and population growth, environmental degradation and vanishing food traditions threaten to change the way we feed ourselves forever.

Food is a lens through which to view where we are and how we got here. Because of this we can begin to ask the question about what to do next, so that we can live our lives more deliciously while leaving something behind that is worthy of the next generation.